1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to suppression of intra-channel and inter-channel interference in coded spread spectrum wireless communication systems with multiple receive antennas. More specifically, the invention takes advantage of the receive diversity afforded by multiple receive antennas in combination with multiple uses of an interference-suppression unit consisting of symbol-estimate weighting, subtractive suppression with a stabilizing step-size, and a mixed-decision symbol estimator.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
In an exemplary wireless multiple-access system, a communication resource is divided into code-space subchannels allocated to different users. A plurality of subchannel signals received by a wireless terminal (e.g., a subscriber unit or a base station) may correspond to different users and/or different subchannels allocated to a particular user.
If a single transmitter broadcasts different messages to different receivers, such as a base station in a wireless communication system serving a plurality of mobile terminals, the channel resource is subdivided in order to distinguish between messages intended for each mobile. Thus, each mobile terminal, by knowing its allocated subchannel(s), may decode messages intended for it from the superposition of received signals. Similarly, a base station typically separates signals it receives into subchannels in order to differentiate between users.
In a multipath environment, received signals are superpositions of time-delayed and complex-scaled versions of the transmitted signals. Multipath can cause several types of interference. Intra-channel interference occurs when the multipath time-spreading causes subchannels to leak into other subchannels. For example, forward-link subchannels that are orthogonal at the transmitter may not be orthogonal at the receiver. When multiple base stations (or sectors or cells) are active, inter-channel interference may result from unwanted signals received from other base stations. These types of interference can degrade communications by causing a receiver to incorrectly decode received transmissions, thus increasing a receiver's error floor. Interference may degrade communications in other ways. For example, interference may diminish the capacity of a communication system, decrease the region of coverage, and/or decrease maximum data rates. For these reasons, a reduction in interference can improve reception of selected signals while addressing the aforementioned limitations due to interference. Multiple receive antennas enable the receiver to process more information, allowing greater interference-reduction than can be accomplished with a single receive antenna.
In code division multiple access (such as used in CDMA 2000, WCDMA, EV-DO (in conjunction with time-division multiple access), and related standards), a set of symbols is sent across a common time-frequency slot of the physical channel and separated by the use of a set of distinct code waveforms, which are usually chosen to be orthogonal (or pseudo-orthogonal for reverse-link transmissions). The code waveforms typically vary in time, with variations introduced by a pseudo-random spreading code (PN sequence). The wireless transmission medium is characterized by a time-varying multi path profile that causes multiple time-delayed replicas of the transmitted waveform to be received, each replica having a distinct amplitude and phase due to path loss, absorption, and other propagation effects. As a result, the received code set is no longer orthogonal. Rather, it suffers from intra-channel interference within a base station and inter-channel interference arising from transmissions in adjacent cells.